On Alfred Bester

Breakthroughs

Tenser, said the Tensor.Tenser, said the Tensor.Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun.

I was much impressed by the mind-block jingle used by Ben Reich in The
Demolished Man to screen his thoughts from telepathic police. I was
instantly convinced that emanations from my own sewer-of-consciousness must be
steaming out into enemy airspace. I was about thirteen....

The gangling Langford of those days was morbidly keen on personal privacy
in which to do alienated, existential things like reading SF magazines. Privacy
was in short supply: even after midnight, parental shock-troops would burst
through the door to confiscate one's torch and battered old serialization of
The Stars My Destination. (Overall, Alfred Bester had an exceedingly bad
effect on me.) And now even thoughts weren't safe.
Tension, apprehension and dissension....

I mercifully don't remember just how seriously I took it, but there was an
embarrassing scrap of supporting evidence: other people did eavesdrop on
what I thought were thoughts. A tendency to clarify thinking by muttering under
my breath was sabotaged by my hearing problem. In the vernacular, I couldn't
hear myself think. But all too often my mother could.

For years and years after this alarming perceptual breakthrough, my brain
still carried the scars. These took the form of a mental subprogram which on
detection of deeply shameful thoughts would burst into distracting song... not
usually
Tenser, said the Tensor but some extract from what you might call the
Nerd's Garden of Verse: poems quoted in my favourite literature. If like
pubescent me you read nothing but SF, the resulting thoat's-eye view of
English poesy is hard to shake off. (I knew Swinburne was a terrifically major
poet, because millions of SF writers swiped the same lines from The Garden
of Proserpine. Conversely, by the same implacable yardstick, Wordsworth and
Yeats and Auden and Eliot weren't up to much. Hardly anyone quoted them.)

Later on, as school and university went by, I grew less keen on being an
Outsider. Those thick invisible walls between my thoughts and yours are
difficult enough to signal through, even without angry young poses of aloofness
and alienation. Spike Milligan's throwaway line "His thoughts, few that
they were, lay silent in the privacy of his head" is funny and too true.
Thoughts lie too silent; they lose too much when fumblingly translated into
words.

This not very profound insight might have come sooner if at the time I'd
ever read anything but SF. It provoked a whole sequence of unpublished skiffy
stories, lumbering metaphors of emotion and communication. As they used to say
at the Pieria writers' group, "God, not another chunk of Langford
sex-perversion-and-telepathy!" I meant to quote from one here, but the mere
recollection of their literary value starts me thinking, very hastily, tension,
apprehension and dissension have begun... tension, apprehension and
dissension have begun....

The Editor My Destination

It is not often that I pick up an issue of Quantum and cry aloud,
'You bastard, Arthur Haupt!' But this man's compulsively detailed discussion of
Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination
(alias Tiger! Tiger!) in issue 42 did rather cut the ground from under a
tiny piece I'd been planning, on the question of just what is the
definitive version of the typographical special effects in that fabled
synaesthesia sequence. According to me, the indications are that no published
text has ever featured the entirety of what Bester wanted.

The much-reprinted British edition Tiger! Tiger! has stayed more or
less unchanged since the Sidgwick and Jackson hardback of 1956, through
subsequent paperbacks by Panther, Penguin and Mandarin (and a 1984 hardback in
the short-lived Goodchild 'SF Alternatives' series of classics). It still
regularly tops All-Time Best SF Novel polls here. Unhappily, this setting of the
book simply leaves out all visual effects which are even slightly difficult to
handle in type. Even the male and female symbols in the names of the Scientific
People were too much trouble. Phrases like 'RED
RECEDED FROM HIM ... GREEN LIGHT ATTACKED
... INDIGO UNDULATED WITH SHUDDERING SPEED'
are not shown in lettering that grows, shrinks or wiggles, but in plain small
capitals. The little bits of artwork for 'a scintillating mist ... a snowflake
cluster of stars ... a shower of liquid diamonds' are simply omitted -- though
they did have a go at the 'strand of cool pearls', with a wobbly line of small
O's.

What caught my eye way back in the 1970s was that even without knowledge of
US versions, the British text has two blatant omissions. Two paragraphs in the
'synaesthesia' section of the narrative end with colons, clearly introducing
special effects which don't actually appear. One is 'The churning of the surf
blinded him with the lights of batteries of footlights:' -- followed by a solid
block of asterisks in the original
Galaxy serialization ...

... and, in the deeply ugly type of the 1970s Berkley paperback, two
wavering lines of asterisks which look less like footlights though more like
surf. There may be nothing there in my various British copies, but at least I
know how it ought to look.

What, however, about the next effect just two paragraphs later? Has anyone
ever seen it? Foyle speaks and 'The sound came out in burning star-bubbles:' ...
but not even the Berkley version offers anything after this colon. The formerly
helpful
Galaxy serial rewrites the sentence to omit the colon cue, offering:
'The sound came out in burning, babbling, burbling star-bubbles.' Ugh. I have a
suspicion that Galaxy editor Horace Gold, who was slightly notorious for
putting in little bits of his own, might have been responsible for this seeming
effort at distraction from whatever's missing here.

In fact there is a faint whiff of censorship in the air. As all true sf
fans (who naturally know the book by heart) will have been muttering for some
while, we experience the beach scene twice thanks to the time-travel of the
Burning Man and know exactly what it is that Foyle says but does not appear as a
graphic effect:

'Christ!'

I wonder. In Bester's original MS, was this word perhaps manically
patterned to form a typewriter-picture of a cross or -- 'burning star-bubbles'
-- several crosses? Did all three editors decide to cut out this one
'controversial' typewriter-doodle on the basis that it was all right to say
'Christ!' but not to flaunt it in typewriter effects? (First Gold with a
camouflaging rewrite in Galaxy, then someone at Sidgwick and Jackson in
Britain for the 1956 Tiger! Tiger! and someone else at Signet for the
1957 The Stars My Destination? I am assuming the Berkley text accurately
follows Signet's, just as every British edition follows S&J's.) Or did
Bester himself think better of it but accidentally leave the introductory colon
in place for each of the two slightly different book versions? Are the original
typescripts preserved in some university library? If not, why not?

Not long ago an sf fan remarked to me that Bester would have loved to have
had access to modern desktop publishing while writing The Demolished Man
and Stars. Maybe it's as well that he didn't, since when he finally
gained complete control over the graphics in a novel the result was the truly
dire Golem100. Nor was I terrifically impressed when in his
The Deceivers (which in many incidental details reads like a sort of
diluted self-plagiarism, of Stars) we are introduced to a computer
display seven centuries hence which can do no better than crude
typewriter-patterns of asterisks. But with DTP now universal and Stars
reportedly out of print in the USA, I urge one of sf's endemic small presses to
think about a memorial edition with a good text (correcting the almost universal
'planets' for 'plants' in the introduction as noted by Arthur Haupt, and the
place where Bester typed the silly 'Inert Lead Isomer' for what should be
'Isotope' ... but
that takes us towards the murky realms of Bester's science, about which
all too much can be said: see Damon Knight's balanced early review in In
Search of Wonder). Modern typesetting and graphics software would surely see
to it that INDIGO UNDULATED WITH SHUDDERING SPEED
more sickeningly and effectively than ever before.

Meanwhile, the British text has further oddities. As well as changing the
now legendary 'Vorga, I kill you filthy' to 'Vorga, I kill you deadly', the
Sidgwick & Jackson editor modified 'Help, you goddamn gods' in Foyle's very
first speech to 'Help, you Heels.' A few pages later, 'lousy gods' and 'sweet
prayer-men' become 'Heels' and 'sweet Heels'. As might be expected, people seem
to prefer the version they were raised on and can debate at length whether
straight blasphemy is more or less effective than the alternative of British
Understatement.

Our UK editor also thoughtfully changed 'twenty-fifth century' to
'twenty-fourth century' throughout, while leaving the prologue's one actual date
('the 2420s') untouched. There is a mysterious cut in the publicity interview on
jaunting, omitting a paragraph of great interest to inmates of Gouffre Martel
... I suppose the editor didn't want to publish information that might help the
criminal classes. Was it respect for religion that led to Bester's correct
'Skoptsy' (or Skoptsi) being disguised as 'Sklotsky'? Worst of all, the crucial
repetition of the 'Gully Foyle is my name' jingle near the very end of the book
is lost in Britain -- jettisoned along with the disposable info-dump sentence
that reminds us who the Scientific People are. But I've always rather liked the
circular hall of the Scientific People with (at least in the Penguin edition)
its 'doomed roof'.

On the other hand, compare: 'Of all brutes in the world he was least
valuable alive and most likely to live.' 'Of all brutes in the world he was
among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive.' With its unshaded
hyperbole and incantatory rhythm, the first is surely more Foyleish, more
Besterish. Yet it's the second, slightly limping sentence that appears in the
generally preferable US text. Moreover, nearly all the motion-as-sound
synaethesia effects are longer in
Tiger: Bester evidently added bits for the British edition [or, more
plausibly, the text was cut for the magazine serialization, which US book
editions then followed]. 'MANTERGEISTMANN!' shouts the movement of the
flames ... and in Tiger (only) continues with 'UNVERTRACKINSTEIGN
GANZELFURSTINLASTENBRUGG!' Likewise the surf cries 'LOGGERMIST CROTEHAVEN JALL.
LOOGERMISK MOTESLAVEN DOOL' (not a bad sound-picture of its motion), while US
editions carry only the first two nonsense words. At the end of Foyle's famous
speech, after 'I give you the stars.', Tiger has the closing line 'I
make you men!': Stars omits this and merely adds 'He disappeared.' --
which is not in Tiger. Help! These are deep waters, Watson, and nobody
thought to ask Alfred Bester until it was too late.

Indeed there is a thesis of awesome scope to be written on the sufferings
of sf novels as they flit to and fro across the Atlantic. What is the fifth
paragraph of A.E.van Vogt's
Slan? My Panther edition (following a 1953 UK hardback) has a fifth
paragraph of info-dump, beginning 'It was new and exciting' ... not present in
the Doubleday hardback, which on the other hand has several passages omitted by
Panther. Travelling the opposite way, there was the infamous case of Eric Frank
Russell's Dreadful Sanctuary, which in one US edition (1963, I think)
acquired -- against the entire narrative trend of this wisecracking
action-adventure -- an unhappy ending. Research continues.

The final stop on my current mission of pedantry was to check out the
latest British edition of Anne McCaffrey's
Dragonflight from Transworld/Corgi, which since 1970 has delighted me
with a specially unfortunate one-letter misprint. (Er, I assume it's a
misprint, with B typed instead of H.) A testimony to the rigid quality control
of publishers, it's still there in 1992. The great moment comes when heroine
Lessa has mysteriously vanished upon her vast, telepathic, teleporting dragon
steed, and the hero gets worried about this, whereupon his own dragon
telepathically scans the entire world of Pern for the missing pair and reports
(possibly to howls of agreement from wicked readers who'd found Lessa's terminal
wilfulness and the dragon's terminal cuteness a mite hard to take): I cannot
bear them.

Blackout....

Footnote

The first piece originally appeared in Frontier Crossings, the
Conspiracy '87 (World SF Convention) souvenir book, 1987 -- which had invited
short-short essays on a vague "Breakthroughs" theme. Alfred Bester was
to have been a guest of honour, but that (alas) was the year of his final
illness.

"The Editor My Destination" originally appeared in Doug Fratz's
Quantum 43/44, 1993. I was delighted to find that by then, that splendid
duo Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein were already planning a collated edition of The
Stars My Destination -- to include the best of the differently misedited US
and UK versions. This, first published as a 1996 Vintage/Random House trade
paperback, is now the standard text on both sides of the Atlantic ... although
it still wasn't possible to trace the typography/artwork for Foyle's "burning
star-bubbles". There are secrets of the Universe with which we were not
meant to meddle....